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Tuesday, 14 February 2006

More bottled stupidity

What about all those idiots using water bottles, eh? As I said a few months back, "How dumb do you have to be to buy this stuff?" Oddly, the Green Party agrees:

Bottled water is a multi-million dollar scam that is threatening the environment and sucking money out of people’s pockets, the Green Party says. “While tap water is better in some places than others, growing sales of single-use bottles are creating a significant problem, as well as costing more than petrol per litre,” Green Party Waste-free Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos says. A major new study from the US-Based Earth Policy Institute has highlighted the environmental cost of the growing trend to buy bottled water.

And the FrogBlog has chimed in too. To their credit, the Green Party hasn't yet called for a ban -- yet -- but you can be sure that will be hard on the heels of the report. It is one of their favourite words, after all, but at this stage they're simply trying to 'lay a guilt trip on you.' However, as Liberty Scott points out, the report they cite is based on some flawed ideas:

Is the world going to be swamped with all these bottles using up land and making our cities and landscapes ridden with garbage?No.

See his argument here. And learn why 1) landfills ain't such a bad thing, and 2) how private property rights and less bureuacracy would reduce litter. And as he says, "Littering is something that environmentalists spend far too little time being concerned about."

2 comments:

Why should it be odd that the Green Party agrees with you? I suspect that there are a lot of things that the Greens and yourself agree on. Recreational drugs or same-sex marriages for instance.

I must take issue though, with your comment that the Greens always want to ban things. Perhaps you could list all the things that you think the Greens want to ban. I think we will find that actually most of them, the Greens want only to discourage their use, say through additional taxes or education campaigns, or minimum standards or suchlike.

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